SOHO Notes 6.0.1 — Worth a look

The first thing that is apparent is that you can add keyword tags to your notes. The second is, though you could make a note “private” in previous versions, notes that you make private now will be encrypted and require a password.

Use with caution. The installation/upgrade notes from Chronos indicate that if you forget the password to your private note(s) neither you nor Chronos will ever be able to retrieve the notes.

The biggest item for me, however, is the ability to design your own custom forms for your data. Now I can effectively use SOHO Notes to keep the password data in a form that handles all the fields of the free app I'd been using and allows me to customize beyond what Yojimbo provides as a preset form.

It's great to be able to put in fields of my choice for such a tool. The only thing I could wish for is a little more flexibility in the form designing itself, specifically I'd like a text field that can be multi-line for something like a comment field. I'm sure that will come with future refinement of this feature.

Throw in the ability to scan directly to the database and I think I'll manage to eliminate 3 separate apps I've been using to store information. That means I can afford to upgrade some other stuff that's been sitting in the queue as well as perhaps purchasing a couple apps I'd put off for lack of funds since I can take a couple off the upgrade treadmill.

The only downside some folks might find with SOHO Notes vs. similar applications is that, though they use “a powerful commercial database”, OpenBase, they use it in a closed system, proprietarily. They have a built in backup utility for it but some folks will still be looking for a product where they can get at the database without the application to at least get at their raw data.

Now I have to go update that pesky review I did. The iusethis count definitely belies a sleeper in this application. It's powerful, flexible and definitely worth a look. Folks who still have StickyNotes take note — your upgrade price is the same as for those of us who upgraded to SOHO Notes when they announced it was replacing StickyNotes. That's quite a nice deal for a substantially more robust application!

Oh, and you can still use it to make Stickies for your desktop if that's what you really want to do with it. But, I think if you check it out you will more than likely decide to upgrade because it just has so much more to offer now.